Items tagged with waymo

Waymo's autonomous vehicle fleet has been piling on the miles ever since the program was first initiated by Google back in 2009. According to the company, its cumulative total for miles driven has swollen to 8 million to date. To put that figure in perspective, it took six years from the time the Google's first autonomous vehicles took to the road until it crossed the one million threshold. The two million mile mark was reached just over a year later the miles have been racking up ever since. Remarkably, Waymo's miles-driven tally has was at "just" 5 million in February of this year. You can chalk...Read more...

Fiat Chrysler has announced that it has expanded its partnership with Waymo. The new deal will see Waymo acquiring an additional 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans for its autonomous fleet. Chrysler was mum on just how many of the vans Waymo was getting when the last deal was announced at the beginning of the year. At that time, all Waymo and FCA had said was that the deal was for “thousands” of minivans. FCA has delivered 600 Pacifica Hybrid minivans to Waymo to date. FCA has also confirmed that the two companies are at the beginning of discussions about using Waymo’s...Read more...

Something went terribly wrong on a Tempe, Arizona road last week, when a pedestrian crossing the street was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber Volvo XC90. The vehicle's sensors didn't detect the pedestrian, meaning that the brakes weren't automatically applied to prevent the crash (or at least lessen its severity). Perhaps more tragically, the human "babysitter" behind the wheel wasn't even paying attention at the time of the crash -- she was looking elsewhere in the cabin instead of keeping an eye on the road ahead. Now, a new report from Reuters suggests that Uber's decision to skimp on...Read more...

While Uber's autonomous driving trials are understandably on hold for the moment, computers Waymo is moving right ahead with new partnership to advance the field. Today, Waymo announced that it has signed an agreement with Jaguar to deliver up to 20,000 self-driving I-PACE electric crossovers over the next few years. Waymo's current fleet consists primarily of Lexus RX 450h Hybrid crossovers (which are being phased out) and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. "Imagine a world where you can take a self-driving minivan to the baseball game with family, and a self-driving I-PACE home after a night...Read more...

We were all stunned last week when it was revealed that an Uber self-driving Volvo X90 crossover struck a pedestrian crossing the street at night, killing her. While there was a human driver behind the wheel at the time of the crash, the Volvo was operating in fully autonomous mode when the accident occurred. 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was walking across the street (outside of the crosswalk area) was hit, and died on the scene. Uber's public relations team and its CEO were quick to offer the condolences and vowed to cooperate with the police in the investigation. The company also took the...Read more...

Now that Waymo is free of its long-running legal battle with Uber, it is focusing its attention on more important endeavors; namely spreading its self-driving technology to more platforms. In this case, Waymo is launching a pilot program that will see autonomous semi-trucks navigating through the Atlanta, Georgia area. Waymo began testing its autonomous trucks during trials in California and Arizona and is ready to expands those trials in high-profile way. While many of the basic principles of a self-driving semi-truck are similar with passenger vehicles like the Lexus RX 450h and Chrysler Pacifica...Read more...

To the uninitiated, riding shotgun in a self-driving car might seem like a scary proposition. Part of the reason is because we are simply not used to seeing a vehicle navigate itself without a human driver behind the wheel, so the image of a potentially deadly hunk of metal motoring down a busy street is inherently concerning. Waymo seems to recognize this, so it has gone and launched a 360-degree virtual reality experience that puts users in the rear seat of a self-driving car. Much of the 3-minute video is spent explaining how Waymo's various sensors survey the landscape to identify all the moving...Read more...

Alphabet's Waymo and Uber have agreed to bury the hatchet and settle a lawsuit revolving the latter's self-driving vehicle aspirations. As a result, Uber will pay Alphabet a hefty sum (in the eyes of mere mortals): $244 million. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still a relatively small figure for Uber, which has value of $72 billion. Waymo alleged that Anthony Levandowski, who headed up Waymo/Google's self-driving car division, took confidential intellectual property (roughly 10GB of data files that were downloaded from corporate servers) with him when he left in early 2016 to start Otto....Read more...

Just two months ago, Waymo announced plans to test a self-driving car service in Phoenix, Arizona, in which commuters could summon a free ride from one of around 600 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans. Now the company is putting the pedal to the metal with "thousands more" of the same hybrid vehicle, each one motoring around without a flesh and blood (read: human) driver behind the wheel. Fiat Chrysler in Canada is producing the self-driving vehicles for Waymo, which is planning to deploy the hybrids in cities where it is currently testing autonomous driving technology. When asked by Wired exactly...Read more...

Uber has been in hot water over the last few months for some very unsavory allegations. Among them was that Uber was hacked resulting in the data of 57 million customers being stolen. The company allegedly paid the hacker $100,000 to delete the data. The latest issue stems from a 37-page letter that Ric Jacobs, a former member of the Uber security team, sent to management earlier this year detailing all the shady things the company has done over the years. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons (Dllu) Until this week, only portions of the letter, called the Jacobs Letter, had been revealed, but now a...Read more...

Waymo, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, continues to accelerate its self-driving car efforts by racking up millions of miles on public roads. The official tally now stands at 4 million miles, of which 1 million of those were accumulated in the past six months alone. In the early going, it took a full 18 months for Waymo to log its first million miles. All of this experience adds up and is crucial to making autonomous vehicles safe for everyday use. Image Source: Waymo "With these 4 million miles of experience, we’ve been able to focus on varied and complex driving scenarios....Read more...

Waymo's legal battle with Uber over autonomous driving technology just got a little bit trickier to navigate for the Alphabet-owned company. Adding to a growing list of unfavorable rulings for Waymo, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out key testimony from the company's damages expert, Michael Wagner, making it more difficult to prove allegations that Uber stole trade secrets related to self-driving vehicle technology. The judge also denied a trade-secret theft claim, along with one of the defendants in the case, ultimately making it more difficult for Waymo to prove that Uber engaged in misconduct...Read more...

Self-driving cars are inevitable when it comes to the future of transportation in the United States and abroad. Many auto manufactures from Ford to Mercedes-Benz to Tesla are racing to make fully autonomous driving technology ready for primetime on public roads by the turn of the decade (or shortly thereafter). Google helped to familiarize many in the tech industry with the idea of self-driving vehicles with its fleet of autonomous Toyota Prius and Lexus RX 450h hybrids. Now that Google's self-driving efforts have been spun into a separate entity called Waymo, parent company Alphabet is hoping...Read more...

Automotive manufacturers and technology firms all around the world are working hard towards an autonomous future for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is that an autonomous car with an infrastructure to allow it to communicate with other cars is safer; which means fewer accidents, less traffic, and a faster daily commute for everyone. Before we can get to that future world where we aren't stuck in traffic or at risk from the distracted person driving beside us on the highway, we need the technology to make these autonomous vehicles a reality. Intel and Waymo have announced that they will...Read more...